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[EveryZig]

With archers, I find you can train weapon skills fairly easily by having they shoot at stuff with wood/bone bolts a lot. You can get lots of those by using 10+ z level drops on your enemies (you can butcher pieces that have exploded off even if you couldn't butcher the whole corpse). if you don't have enough stuff to shoot at, you can release caged enemies in boxes made of fortifications.

[Flying Dice]

A fun part of danger rooms is making an advanced one for your best soldiers, filled with iron spears. That tends to weed out the slow healers and those prone to infection pretty well.

[Girlinhat]

My military is invariably fast healers, because I put their barracks on top of a hatch that drops them 2-3 Z's.  Falling damage, trip to the doctor, return to training.  Get some nicely scarred and tough soldiers.

[Hyndis]

Just give them the best armor and shields you can make and give them all crossbows. Metal bolts are best. Wood or bone bolts are too light to do any serious damage to a goblin.

The hail of inaccurate crossbow bolts will devastate anything. They will very quickly train up into unbeatable killing machines, and they will also get plenty of melee combat in, however even unskilled they will be able to win in melee because by the time goblins get to them the goblins will be all severely wounded from the hail of bolts, so your dwarves will be able to easily finish them off in melee.

[Girlinhat]

Actually, I've seen bone reliably break through bronze helms.  I usually make a handful of wood bolts, which turns into a double-handful of corpses, which turn into a cartload of bone bolts.  Experienced soldiers get to shoot metal, until then they train using bone and wood.

[bobhayes]

slaughter them all like a lawnmower on a warm summer's day

We missed you on the forums. This is why.

[Hyndis]

Actually, I've seen bone reliably break through bronze helms.  I usually make a handful of wood bolts, which turns into a double-handful of corpses, which turn into a cartload of bone bolts.  Experienced soldiers get to shoot metal, until then they train using bone and wood.

Bone and wood bolts can do damage, but you're just going to do a whole lot more damage with metal bolts than with wood or bone bolts.

Start out with bone or wood if there is nothing better available, but then make bolts out of goblinite. Just melt down the goblin gear and forge metal bolts, which will get your more goblinite, which will get you more bolts, and so forth.

[Psieye]

Sounds like your squad is too big. If it's 10 with 10 minimum training orders everyone will stand around waiting for the full group to get there, train for a few minutes, then get hungry/thirsty/see a bug and wander off.

This doesn't match up to my experiences in the latest version. I know this used to be the case when one squad would hold just one demonstration class and everyone would attend. Nowadays it's hard to get everyone to attend the lesson of my skilled Teacher sergeant because the squad is holding like 4 demonstrations simultaneously. The minimum training threshold is meaningless to me now as everyone does whatever they want: be it having 5 demonstrations separately or individual combat drills or sparring. I'm surprised they'll even spar when they're only at dabbling weapon skill but I've seen them do that.

I don't know why other people still have problems with training. Only thing I can think of is that I make minimalist (exact match) uniforms for when recruits are being trained.

[Ahrimahn]

Hi there,

I've been playing dwarf fortress for some time now without any problems (ok, lots of problems, but nothing the wiki and copious amounts of fun couldn't fix) But now I'm kinda stuck.

My Military consist of a full 10 dwarf squad, thats set to train all year long. They don't have any actual combat skills, but instead of sparring and getting any actual experience, they just sit on their asses all day and try to teach each other their dabbling fighting skills. I have used dwarf therapist to look at the xp levels, and after one year, there has maybe been a 10xp increase in dodging, despite them doing dodging and combat training all the time. Presumably because their teacher doesn't know **** about dodging either and just falls on his face alot. All their weapon skill remain at "dabbling", no matter what weapon I give them.

How do I transform my military from a bunch of loudmouths with no skills into the fighting machines that they (being dwarves) should be?

Give them a Baptism by Fire this will root out the weak.

[drkpaladin]

2 dwarves to a squad, set to train 2 at a time all year round.  The only downside is that you will have multiple pages of military squads for a large military, but this can actually be useful for micromanaging during combat.  Less time wasted on instruction, alot more time sparring.

[Fredd]

When dwarves have no job, and that months schedule has no orders, they will individually train(weapon practice). So if you rig up a system, where the only job that is done, is by the military, you can somewhat control the amount of weapons practice they do.
 You have a squad of 8. Make them all pump operators. Build two or three pumps, set them to be activated continiously. So on months you have no orders, most will weapon train, others will work.Turn off all other jobs, except pump operator. Every three months, use this schedule, No order/Train/No order. Will gain weapon skills, in the train months will learn and refresh skills, and spar. Also has the benefit of keeping them all happily employed, while improving good stats. Make sure they are on the active training schedule, and make sure you change the orders for the schedule you want.

[elitepastafa]

I don't have the slightest clue what this thread is about, and I'm too tired to read it, but I just wanted to tell you that now I really, REALLY  want to mod dwarves to be filled with a hot gas.

[SenorOcho]

With archers, I find you can train weapon skills fairly easily by having they shoot at stuff with wood/bone bolts a lot. You can get lots of those by using 10+ z level drops on your enemies (you can butcher pieces that have exploded off even if you couldn't butcher the whole corpse). if you don't have enough stuff to shoot at, you can release caged enemies in boxes made of fortifications.

Or in my case, just go with quantity over quality to begin with.  90 recruits/novice marksdwarves with wood/bone bolts...

I used over a thousand bolts in the last siege, and the carnage was glorious.  Captive survivors will be used to help train my melee squads.

[Hyndis]

With archers, I find you can train weapon skills fairly easily by having they shoot at stuff with wood/bone bolts a lot. You can get lots of those by using 10+ z level drops on your enemies (you can butcher pieces that have exploded off even if you couldn't butcher the whole corpse). if you don't have enough stuff to shoot at, you can release caged enemies in boxes made of fortifications.

Or in my case, just go with quantity over quality to begin with.  90 recruits/novice marksdwarves with wood/bone bolts...

I used over a thousand bolts in the last siege, and the carnage was glorious.  Captive survivors will be used to help train my melee squads.

Exactly. Just start off your military with 50+ marksdwarves all just sitting in a small barracks at your entrance. Make it a smallish, 5x5 barracks from an armor stand so they're all stacked up more or less on top of each other.

While each individual marksdwarf isn't very skilled, the sheer quantity of bolts they're shooting will slaughter everything.

People who are trying to use archery ranges are doing it wrong. Your marksdwarves will suck if you're trying to teach them that way. Live fire training is where its at.

Give them the best armor and shields you can make. Give them a crossbow, quiver, and make a pile of bolts. They'll handle it from there. They will also club the survivors to death with their crossbows when they run out of ammo, but by the time they run out of ammo any surviving goblins will be so severely wounded they won't be able to fight back.

[drkpaladin]

Yeah its true, while having well trained and equipped troops is nice, its just marginally better than having waves upon waves of nonskilled dwarves who do not have large families or groups of friends.  There is plenty of rock to make coffins from, and the equipment of the fallen can be cycled back into service.